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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

So I just bummed an old comp from a friend of mine, and I'm gonna install Ubuntu on it. I also have an 6.5 GB HD that I already installed in it. So now the machine has 6.5 GB and a 30GB HDs in it.

What is the best way to disribute my linux installion on the system? I'm guessing it would be better to put the main sys files on the smaller one and store my data (music, docs etc) on the large one. What mount points(/home, /usr, /) do i put on either drive ?

I would make the smaller drive the master, and the bigger the slave. I would make 4 partitions, boot, / , swap, and /home. I have read that with multiple drives, it makes the most sense to have swap and / on oposite drives, that way it can simultaneously write to the main drive and the swap, which can't happen if they are on the same drive. You're talking milliseconds of difference, but I tend to think every little bit counts. I would set things up like this:

Sounds like you got the right idea. It depends on how many partitions and mount points you want, how much space Ubuntu will take, and how much space you want to save for programs that will be installed alongside the system and not in /home (although I don't think this could be much).

Many people like to have 3 or 4 partitions, / , /boot , /home , and swap. I read somewhere once that performance is supposed to be better if the swap partition is on a separate hard disk than the main operating system files. I never really seen any numbers on this though. Probably doesn't make that much of a difference, but its something you may want to think about.

I think a lot of its preference. Like you said, I would put /home on the 30Gig.

One important point. The swap drive must be on the other IDE channel. There is a hardware limitation here. You can read from one channel while writing to the other but you cannot do a simultaenous read and write on the same channel.

Does it make a difference? I believe so. At work, I used to recover HDDs from windows machines being scrapped and install them in elderly machines still in use. In each case the users reported a performance improvement *UNDER LOAD*. ie, when swapping kicked in, things went faster.

I assume that the same will hold true for Linux BUT remember that a HDD on the same channel as a CDROM may have its performance degraded. Depends on how modern the kit is.